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Reno Says Her Warning on China Failed

Attorney General Janet Reno said today that she knew last May about evidence of Chinese efforts to influence American politics, but left the task of alerting the White House to the F.B.I. after trying and failing to reach the national security adviser, Anthony Lake.

Two counterintelligence experts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation briefed intelligence aides at the National Security Council the next month, but the aides never passed on the information to Mr. Lake or President Clinton.

The White House and the F.B.I. publicly blamed each other this week for the embarrassing lapse, which occurred as the Democratic Party was ardently pursuing huge Asian donations for its election campaign.

Speaking to reporters, Ms. Reno said she had asked intelligence officials in the Justice Department and the Office of Professional Responsibility at the F.B.I. to review the guidelines for briefing White House officials, to insure ''a clear line of communications'' in the future.

The circumstances of Ms. Reno's effort to reach Mr. Lake were not entirely clear. A spokesman for the Justice Department said Ms. Reno was traveling at the time and called Mr. Lake's office from the road ''just to see if he was there.''

''He was not,'' the spokesman, Bert Brandenburg, said. ''And she indicated that she would let it proceed through the briefing process,'' rather than pursue Mr. Lake further.

Ms. Reno also received dueling letters today about the fund-raising affair from members of the House Judiciary Committee. The first was a request by Republicans that she begin the process of naming an independent counsel to examine Democratic fund-raising practices. The other was a letter from the Democrats on the committee that denounced the first letter as partisan and baseless.

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The Republican letter has a legal purpose. By law, an attorney general has to respond in 30 days to a request for an independent prosecutor by a majority of either the House or Senate Judiciary Committees. Republicans on the Senate panel prepared a similar letter today.

But Ms. Reno is required to say only whether she will open an inquiry to determine the need for an independent counsel. In their letter, the Democrats argued that Ms. Reno had already said she was studying that issue.

The Democrats also said the Republicans were playing politics because their request for an inquiry was solely directed toward the White House and the Democratic Party, and not toward Republican fund-raising. Ms. Reno said she had not seen the letters.

Separately, the Clinton Administration said it would hold no further White House receptions for wealthy contributors to the Democratic Party until new rules governing Democratic fund-raising were in place.

The White House spokesman, Michael McCurry, disputed a report in The Washington Post on Wednesday that the Administration had quietly canceled four donors' events in the Executive Mansion, including one on the weekend before Mr. Clinton's inauguration, for fear that they would be swept up in the debate over fund-raising abuses. The Post said the events had been called off or moved outside the White House.

But Mr. McCurry said the events had not been canceled, because aides already decided to ban temporarily White House political receptions, and so they had never been formally entered on Mr. Clinton's schedule.